A detail from Henry Nelson O’Neil’s 1855 painting A Mother Depositing Her Child at a Foundling Hospital, on show at the London Foundling Museum’s forthcoming exhibition.
Photograph: The Foundling Museum

I am surrounded by a set of paintings produced 150 years ago at the height of the Victorian age, and the one thing that stands out is a sense of desperation. What is truly shocking and tragic is that they all portray ordinary young mothers caught up in a terrible and unforgiving morality that means abandoning their children is their best, and in many cases their only, hope for the future.

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All the images are at the Foundling hospital in London, which, in the middle of the 19th century, took in and raised the babies of “fallen women”. Unmarried women who became pregnant had extremely limited choices and, for many, the only possible route was to give up their child to the Foundling hospital and then attempt to claw their way back to their “respectable” lives as governesses or servants.

Throughout the 19th century, about 4,500 women handed over their children at this hospital alone. Now a museum, it has held many exhibitions over recent years charting what happened to these babies. But next week, the focus will shift to a story previously untold: the mothers’ tales. Who were these women? How did they get into their predicament? And what became of them after they had given up their babies?

They are stories, says Professor Lynda Nead of London’s Birkbeck College, curator of the exhibition, that have been hard to assemble. These women were trying to escape the workhouse (where infant mortality was more than 90%) and gain a measure of respectability; but for both mother and child to survive, they inevitably had to be parted, because no woman could raise a child born outside marriage and remain in “polite society”, or employment, in the 19th century. And so they brought their babies to the hospital.

An 1848 etching by George Cruikshank, A destitute girl throws herself from a bridge, which is on show at the Foundling Museum. Photograph: Wellcome Library, London

To get their child accepted, the mothers needed to submit a written petition to prove they were of previous “good character”, and that they had only “fallen” into a “criminal conversation”, as it was euphemistically called, on this one occasion. In front of a panel of middle-aged and elderly men, the young women were forced to describe the details of their sex lives, and their sexual history. Many of the women were illiterate, so their petitions were written down by someone else, and these tragic submissions are another part of the new exhibition.

They were women like 21-year-old Ann Gidding, who in 1831 told the Foundling hospital’s governors that she had been a housemaid to Miss Murray of 16 Wilton Crescent. The child’s father, she explained, was John Harewood, a footman at the house. After she discovered she was pregnant, he abandoned her; and she had, she explained, no other means whatsoever of supporting her child, imploring the governors to “take this to your feeling consideration”.

Susannah Jane Keys, who had recently given birth to twins, explained that the father of her children was a lodger at the home of friends. He seemed respectable and came to visit her at her father’s house, but raped her there. She “resisted and cried out”, but there was no one to hear.

Harriet Hooper met the father of her child at a singing class run by a church organist; he offered to take her to a house where there was a piano, so she could sing there; but on arrival it transpired “there was no pianoforte but a bed. I wished to leave but he prevented me and kept me for some time,” she explained. She never saw him again.

When Annie Culver, a housemaid, became pregnant, the father of her child told her to drown herself, and said he would help her to do it.

Sarah Farquar, who arrived at the hospital with her child in 1854, was different from many, in that she was a governess and so was able to write her own petition. In a series of letters to the secretary of the hospital, she describes how she was drugged and then raped, and that when she later found she was pregnant, “My first thought was self-destruction and this I attempted twice.”

The stories of these women are unlikely to be the whole truth, explains Nead, because in their desperation they would try to jump through the hoops the Foundling hospital assembled. “They knew what they had to say to get their baby saved, and it was that they had had been respectable, that they had fallen from virtue, and that they could return to respectability if they could give up their babies.

“It’s very clear that they feel they have no option but to give their babies up; and it’s very clear that they are aware that this is all about judgment. They were judged right from the very start, in fact: when they came to collect a form from the porter’s lodge, the porter would make notes on their appearance that would later be on their file.”

Deserted – A Foundling by Frank Holl (1873) at the Fallen Woman exhibition at the Foundling Museum. Photograph: The Foundling Museum

Sometimes, though, their petition was rejected. When the hospital authorities investigated Ann Gidding’s story, for example, they discovered there was no Miss Murray at Wilton Crescent, or at Wilton Terrace or Wilton Place either, and her application was turned down.

What happened next to the mothers who were successful in getting the hospital to take their babies is the hardest thing of all to discover, says Nead. “They melted out of the picture: they were not encouraged to visit their children or to try to keep up any kind of relationship with them.”

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Of the thousands of women who deposited their children at the hospital during the 19th century, only two ever seem to have been in a position to claim them back, despite the fact that another of the paintings in the show – by the artist Emma Brownlow, whose father was the hospital’s director – is The Foundling Restored to its Mother in 1858.

In a way, the painting is fitting because it illustrates how fable is woven with reality in the story of the fallen women and their babies. At the heart of Victorian England was a myth about women and their virtue, and it is forcefully echoed in the culture of the age: not only the sort of paintings that are included in the exhibition, but also the literature of the times (Lady Dedlock in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1853 novel Ruth).

What was essential to Victorian England was that women stayed “pure” (there was, unsurprisingly, no parallel narrative of a “fallen man”) and what happened to the mothers who arrived with their babies at the Foundling hospital, as played out across the art and literature and music of the century, was to be a lesson to all the rest. The “fault” was all female; and for the women who fell, the drop was very far indeed.

•The Fallen Woman is at the Foundling Museum in London from 25 September 2015 to 3 January 2016